problem_redditor
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No, I’m suggesting that the level of discrimination faced by a white or Asian man is lower than for most other groups, particularly women—even though the social acceptability of discriminating against the former is much higher. There are obviously some jobs (childcare, nursing) where a woman gets a discriminatory advantage.
Oh, there are plenty of jobs where women get a discriminatory advantage, and not necessarily always in stereotypically female fields either. STEM for example is a good case study of a field which is thought to be discriminatory against women, but actually favours them.
This paper by Williams and Ceci finds that faculty members in STEM, when evaluating hypothetical applicants for assistant professorships in biology, engineering, economics, and psychology, "preferred female applicants 2:1 over identically qualified males with matching lifestyles (single, married, divorced), with the exception of male economists, who showed no gender preference."
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1418878112
This review in Psychology Today considering the evidence regarding gender bias in science shows that studies showing egalitarian attitudes or bias against male scientists are more common than those showing bias against female scientists. There were 4 papers showing bias favouring men, whereas there were 8 showing no gender bias and 6 showing bias favouring women.
The Williams and Ceci paper included in the review reported 5 studies, however, so if we shift our focus to number of studies instead of papers the empirical data shows that there were 4 studies showing bias favouring men, 8 showing no gender bias and 10 showing bias favouring women. On the whole, the evidence as presented in this review seems to lean towards "there is bias in favour of women in STEM".
The author goes on to state that "there was far more evidence of egalitarian or pro-female bias than there is of pro-male bias". He also notes that studies showing peer-reviewed science is unbiased or favours women tend to have larger sample sizes than those which show biases favouring men, but are cited much less (largely due to an ideological bias in academia in favour of the "discrimination against women" hypothesis).
There's also research with a more generalised scope, and a lot of that data does not support the idea that discrimination in the workplace is primarily a women's issue (rather, the findings often indicate the very opposite). For example:
"By utilizing data from the first harmonized comparative field experiment on gender discrimination in hiring in six countries, we can directly compare employers’ callbacks to fictitious male and female applicants. The countries included vary in a number of key institutional, economic, and cultural dimensions, yet we found no sign of discrimination against women. This cross-national finding constitutes an important and robust piece of evidence. Second, we found discrimination against men in Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, and the UK, and no discrimination against men in Norway and the United States. However, in the pooled data the gender gradient hardly differs across countries. Our findings suggest that although employers operate in quite different institutional contexts, they regard female applicants as more suitable for jobs in female-dominated occupations, ceteris paribus, while we find no evidence that they regard male applicants as more suitable anywhere."
https://academic.oup.com/esr/article/38/3/337/6412759?login=false
The notion that women are "disadvantaged more" is very questionable at best.
But I’ve got it pretty good, and I suspect that all else equal, white men of comparable intelligence and background are likely to say the same.
Relying on personal perception (which seems to be the main source that you and many other people here are drawing from) is a particularly unconvincing argument, since people have biases. White men in particular have been exposed to a narrative from a very young age that they do not face issues because of their race or sex, in fact they are told they are privileged because of it, whereas women and PoC get it hammered into their head that the society they live in is a white cisheteropatriarchal one that oppresses them. It's not hard to see how this is going to influence perceptions, and how this is going to lead to women and PoC interpreting more events as discriminatory against them than white men since it takes far more for white men to jump to the conclusion that they're being discriminated against because of their immutable characteristics. The narrative that endlessly circulates in society gears white men to perceive evidence of their privilege, not their disadvantage.
Furthermore, in the case of male/female dynamics there are also other factors that influence things. For example women score higher on neuroticism than men which obviously predisposes them to perceive more things as malicious than men do. Women can capitalise on claims of vulnerability in ways men simply can't due to our protectiveness towards women, and thus benefit from perceiving danger and expressing it to others in order to elicit nurturance and help (the opposite is true for men: Men who complain and present themselves as vulnerable and put-upon run the risk of inviting ire). This is obviously going to impact which sex is more likely to perceive slight and complain about that slight.
EDIT: clarity
I used to be neutral on ol' Elon before this, now I like him.
I'm in the very same boat. Before this whole Twitter fiasco I thought he was a bit of a kook, and now he's a kook I find myself actively cheering on.
What ultimately matters to me is that Twitter ceases to be a propaganda tool for progressives. The worst case scenario here is that Twitter neither changes nor collapses and continues down the very same path it was on before Musk's takeover.
How the fuck did no one think to ask 'could it be that women simply do not aspire to leadership roles?' This strikes me as a real face palm moment for feminists. At the outset, it's a valid criticism that the research just hadn't been done prior.
It is not a valid criticism that the research hasn't been done prior, since there has repeatedly been research into women and leadership roles which has found little to no evidence of bias against women. This is in politics, not management roles, but it's very similar in focus.
The authors of the book "Sex as a Political Variable" compared the success rates of the men and women who were candidates in general elections for state legislatures in 1986, 1988, 1990, 1992, and 1994 and for the U.S. House, U.S. Senate and governor from 1972 to 1994. They find that "Women's success rates were extremely similar to men's over all the years covered in this study".
The book notes on page 85 that "Our research clearly shows that women do as well as men in general elections. It also shows that the reason there aren't more women in public office is that not many women have run. Women have made up a very small percentage of candidates in general elections, particularly at higher levels of office."
And no, it's not a face palm moment for feminists at all, since their refusal to accept female choice as an explanation is entirely wilful and informed by their ideology. My experience is that no matter how much you bring up these types of evidence to them, they repeatedly try to explain away these findings asserting that discrimination exists at other levels.
One of the arguments that I see levelled a lot is that female candidates are often treated worse than male candidates in the press and by the electorate, and the claim is that this differential treatment makes running for office more complex and complicated for women than men, even if it does not ultimately preclude their electoral success. However:
"Our examination of media coverage and voters’ evaluations of candidates for the U.S. House of Representatives reveals no systematic gender differences. The detailed content analysis of newspaper coverage during the 2010 midterms found not only that news outlets devoted a comparable number of stories to men and women running for office, but also that those articles looked the same. Male and female candidates were equally likely to receive mentions of their gender and they were associated with the same traits and issues. Our analysis of Cooperative Congressional Election Study data indicates that voters were just as unlikely as journalists to assess candidates in traditionally gendered terms. Instead, partisanship, ideology, incumbency, and news coverage—long identified as important forces in congressional elections—shaped voters’ evaluations. Candidate sex did not. These conclusions emerged from a study of unusual depth and scope, encompassing media and survey data from nearly 350 House districts involving more than 100 female and 500 male candidates."
The authors of the study claim that these results conflict with much of the existing literature, but in fact there is a fairly large body of research which has been largely ignored that is in line with the findings of this study.
Full text: https://sci-hub.hkvisa.net/10.1017/S1537592714003156
Another claim which gets made repeatedly is that women are not encouraged enough into political office and that this is the reason why they run less. Of course, this is an argument that doesn't stand up to scrutiny. Is men being more encouraged to run for political office causing men to be more interested in running than women? Or is men demonstrating a greater interest in running causing them to be encouraged to do it more? I think the latter is more likely - people typically don't encourage others to pursue a certain career if they don't seem cut out for the role or express disinterest in running in the first place.
The assumptions regarding the direction of the causation seem to be based on absolutely nothing, and the more you delve into the topic and refute their claims about discrimination against women, the more they appeal to a Patriarchy Of The Gaps: regardless of how much evidence there is of the gap being caused by female choices, there is still something lurking in the social fabric causing oppression.
The fact that feminists have neglected female-choice explanations for the disparity is no accident at all, it is ideologically-driven. They're invested in a narrative of female oppression, and contradictory results that suggest oppression is nowhere to be found don't matter to them.
This whole thing is genuinely hilarious, the fact that the "mummy" bears an uncanny resemblance to E.T. and the repeated assertions by the press that scientists managed to "draw DNA evidence using radiocarbon dating" makes this perhaps the most unintentionally funny thing I've read in a while. Guys, I measured the velocity of a moving car using mass spectrometry, please believe my results.
At this point, I would be glad to never hear about ayy lmaos again - I'm actually interested in the topic but the ayy craze has crossed the line into sheer parody. It's particularly frustrating because there are more credible (albeit circumstantial) pieces of evidence out there they could grab onto like the Viking Lander biological experiments, but their case has hinged around ridiculous UFOlogy and eyewitness testimony and now apparently they're resorting to using ridiculous E.T. looking mummies that obviously aren't faked at all.
Here is the link to the education standards, and here is the primary section they are getting angry over. It isn't even saying that "slavery benefited blacks" per se, it's saying something much more defensible:
SS.68.AA.2.3 Examine the various duties and trades performed by slaves (e.g., agricultural work, painting, carpentry, tailoring, domestic service, blacksmithing, transportation).
Benchmark Clarifications: Clarification 1: Instruction includes how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.
This isn't even wrong. Here is, for example, a page from George Washington University saying the very same thing:
Slaves had many noteworthy skills and talents which made plantations economically self-sufficient. The services of slave blacksmiths, carpenters, coopers, shoemakers, tanners, spinners, weavers and other artisans were all used to keep plantations running smoothly, efficiently, and with little added expense to the owners. These same abilities were also used to improve conditions in the quarters so that slaves developed not only a spirit of self-reliance but experienced a measure of autonomy. These skills, when added to other talents for cooking, quilting, weaving, medicine, music, song, dance, and storytelling, instilled in slaves the sense that, as a group, they were not only competent but gifted. Slaves used their talents to deflect some of the daily assaults of bondage. They saw themselves then as strong, valuable people who were unjustly held against their will rather than as the perpetually dependent children or immoral scoundrels described by so many of their owners. Indeed, they found through their artistry some moments of happiness, particularly by telling tales which portrayed work in humorous terms or when singing satirical songs which lampooned their owners.
Richard Toler was trained as a blacksmith during slavery and later went on to try his hand as a carpenter and stonemason. He could also play the fiddle but recalled that he and his people were always treated poorly on the plantation:
https://www2.gwu.edu/~folklife/bighouse/panel19.html
But when Florida's education system says it, it's problematic and three million inflated hitpieces need to be written about how terrible Florida and Desantis is, despite the fact that educational institutions like GWU have explicitly taken the very same perspective. Politics is the ultimate mind-killer. I suppose you could make a coherent argument that if the picture being painted of slavery is primarily a positive one the Florida standards encourage teachers to lie by omission. Except it's clearly not doing so, because in a section right afterwards:
SS.912.AA.1.7 Compare the living conditions of slaves in British North American colonies, the Caribbean, Central America and South America, including infant mortality rates.
Benchmark Clarifications: Clarification 1: Instruction includes the harsh conditions and their consequences on British American plantations (e.g., undernourishment, climate conditions, infant and child mortality rates of the enslaved vs. the free). Clarification 2: Instruction includes the harsh conditions in the Caribbean plantations (i.e., poor nutrition, rigorous labor, disease). Clarification 3: Instruction includes how slavery was sustained in the Caribbean, Dutch Guiana and Brazil despite overwhelming death rates.
And in another one:
SS.912.AA.1.9 Evaluate how conditions for Africans changed in colonial North America from 1619-1776.
Benchmark Clarifications: Clarification 1: Instruction includes both judicial and legislative actions during the colonial period. Clarification 2: Instruction includes the history and development of slave codes in colonial North America including the John Punch case (1640). Clarification 3: Instruction includes how slave codes resulted in an enslaved person becoming property with no rights.
It's funny, because the critics are claiming that Florida's education standards are presenting a "sanitised" view of history, while in reality the people who want a sanitised half-truth to be painted are the critics themselves, who would readily strip demonstrable historical facts out of the record to support their political project.
Another interesting piece of information that people don't particularly like to acknowledge is that colonisation might actually have benefited the colonised countries' economies and resulted in improved health and general wellbeing when compared with the counterfactual situation.
For example, countries like Kenya benefited from the establishment of a cash economy, the modernisation of infrastructure, and the spread of Western medicine. There’s a study which used height data as a proxy for nutrition and health to investigate how well Kenyans did under colonial rule. It notes that “however bad colonial policies and devastating short-term crises were, the net outcome of colonial times was a significant progress in nutrition and health.” Other numbers quoted in that article show improvements in the health infrastructure as well as a steep decline in infant mortality during the colonial period.
This article, in trying to explain the end of colonialism, speaks of a population explosion that occurred pretty much everywhere in the colonised world, and notes that while sometimes this was a result of immigration, in most colonies it was a result of population growth. "[P]opulation increase during the colonial period presumably was not an exogenous event, but rather a result of changes produced by colonialism itself —specifically, increased employment opportunities and decreased mortality due to the introduction of European technologies." The author suggests the increased population resulted in more subversive activity and extralegal appropriation of profits which might explain decolonisation.
Interestingly, it was not during colonialism, but during independence that the situations of many of the colonised countries became how it is today. This World Bank report notes "Almost every African country has witnessed a systematic regression of capacity in the last thirty years; the majority had better capacity at independence than they now possess. Many countries have lost professionals with valuable skills to more prosperous neighbors or to the developed world because of poor motivational practices, poor governance, internal conflicts, and civil wars. Guinea presents the most classic example of this decline. At independence, Guinea had a highly motivated public service, with clear rules on recruitment, promotion, and appointments to senior positions. Public sector infrastructure - roads, telephones, and so on-were adequate and well functioning. All these have broken down today."
And once the "colonisers" left, African politics became quite the corrupted hellhole. "[O]nce the political imperative of independence was achieved, the tools of nation building became a double-edged sword, increasingly coming to serve the ends of patronage in the struggle to retain and consolidate power. In this struggle, economic logic was the loser, resulting in factories located miles from critical inputs, paved roads extending into useless bush, while areas of high agricultural output were left unexploited for lack of transport. The heavy and often corrupted and corrupting hand of the centralized autocratic political system reached into all branches of the public service, controlling public administration, the judiciary, the private sector, and civil society."
Even the worst example of colonial exploitation, the Congo, had a better deal under colonisation then it does now. The Congo Free State under Leopold II was pretty bad, yes. On the other hand, the Belgian Congo was... okay, relatively speaking. Infrastructure was built, and living standards improved to a degree that would not be seen there at any point after. I think Moldbug makes a convincing case for it here, and it's notable that some Congolese after independence expressed a wistfulness for the days of colonialism. This Time article details such a perspective from a Congolese man.
"We should just give it all back to the whites," the riverboat captain says. "Even if you go 1,000 kilometers down this river, you won't see a single sign of development. When the whites left, we didn't just stay where we were. We went backwards."
“The river is the artery of Congo’s economy,” he says. “When the Belgians and the Portuguese were here, there were farms and plantations — cashews, peanuts, rubber, palm oil. There was industry and factories employing 3,000 people, 5,000 people. But since independence, no Congolese has succeeded. The plantations are abandoned.” Using a French expression literally translated as “on the ground,” he adds: “Everything is par terre.”
This is not necessarily a case in favour of colonialism and colonial policy, but if someone wants to claim that whites should feel some sort of endless historical guilt for the plight of third-world countries today and subject themselves to a system of racial reparations, they’ve got another thing coming.
there are plenty of stories of women who got drunk at a party and wound up with a child and a deadbeat dad.
And if and when she did, the system won't hold her accountable. It offers her plenty of outs, such as 1: abortion, 2: safe haven abandonment, and 3: adoption, all of which she has a unique ability to access because she carries the child, and additionally any child born out of wedlock is in her sole custody by default and thus she won't be guilty of custodial interference by taking advantage of safe haven laws. Pray tell, why has your hypothetical woman not taken advantage of any of these options available to her, if she does not want to care for a child and the father is out of the picture? And which analogous "ways out" are fathers allowed?
The point isn't to "hand your money over to a woman," it's to avoid having unsupported children who become the state's responsibility. You want to get your dick wet, you know there is a possibility of producing a child, and if it's not your responsibility (jointly) to provide for that child, then whose is it?
Yet safe haven abandonment is explicitly allowed, and these laws absolutely create unsupported children who become the state's responsibility. I suppose that by the same token, you oppose safe haven abandonment as a method of surrendering parental responsibility for women, correct? If you have decided not only to perform the act that resulted in conception but also have carried the pregnancy to term and have eschewed every option to terminate up until that point, then you absolutely have the responsibility to care for it. Under this worldview, that is.
I'm not going to lie, this entire "personal responsibility" screed you've produced here sounds like an awfully convenient way to avoid the clear double standards that exist surrounding this entire thing.
The law isn't an algorithm, this is like comparing that one man who shot someone in Kansas and got a suspended sentence and that other woman who shot someone in Florida and got life.
If you look at it in isolation, perhaps. Looking at the entire picture, it forms part of a much larger pattern wherein women are treated with far more leniency and are granted far more options when it comes to abrogating parental responsibilities.
None of the men moaning that it's unfair they can't sever parental responsibilities after a hook-up would be satisfied by a law carving out an exception for male rape victims.
Sure. They're claiming it's unfair they can't sever parental responsibilities because women can.
Standpoint theory is a ridiculous concept. It's a circular argument wherein anyone who claims that they're part of an oppressed group can state that everyone should accept their claims because they have knowledge that no one does. The entire house of cards is fundamentally based on the following horror: "I'm oppressed and you're privileged, thus I have a superior knowledge and you have no such standing. How can I be sure that I suffer the oppression which confers upon me this epistemic advantage in the first place? Because I'm oppressed and you're privileged". If I didn't know better, I'd say that the people who use this have no sense of logic. Unfortunately, knowing what I know it reads to me like activism in its most shameless and unprincipled form.
I feel very much the same way with psychological pain points. Claiming offence over something trivial when none was intended, then demanding that everyone you meet must immediately adapt themselves to kowtow to your sensibilities, is a dysfunctional way of approaching social interaction. It's even worse when you're asking people to rework their approaches to fundamental things that are based in reality like gender binaries - an approach that works with all but a tiny percentage of the population, I might add. It smacks of sociopathy. It's a way to assert power over people and get them to assent to things that are prima facie ridiculous for the sake of your comfort. Supposedly, acknowledging any worldview other than the one you want will make you feel unsafe and like you don't have the right to exist, and so anyone who speaks to you must repeatedly spit in the face of their own sense of reality for the sake of prioritising your comfort before their own.
The funny thing is that I check off many boxes in the Intersectional Stack (a model which is based on flawed premises most or all of which I reject), so progressives usually can't use the "You're just privileged and don't have empathy" shit against me since that would contradict the framework which they operate off.
One of the things that was remarkable about this campaign was how overwhelming the Yes campaign's resources were.
The amount of resources there are behind progressive politics is pretty much always immense, basically every influential institution was supporting Yes. At the entrance of my train station, there were Yes campaigners outside for days, handing out flyers to people. Even bodies that should strictly be impartial such as local governments (City of Sydney) were putting up advertisements all over the place telling people to support the Voice, which is frankly inappropriate and clearly overstepping the bounds of their ambit. As you note, it ended up being very clear that this was not some grassroots campaign for change, but a well-funded, dominant group filled with people who have an overwhelming influence over what the public gets to hear and see.
It's also very clear that the well-funded progressive elite, the people who populate the opinion-setting parts of the media, academia, and various other institutions, have hugely lost touch with the rest of the country and simply don't care to listen to them. Then every single time people turn against their policies, there always seems to be such a great amount of surprise and dismay that people would disagree with them, and a knee-jerk assumption that the reason for lack of support can simply be chalked up to stupidity or racism. Perhaps some of it is performative, but I do think that they really believe it.
I've been refreshing the counts for the past few hours, and this referendum failed even harder than I thought it was going to as well. 60% rejecting the proposal and losing all states is a pretty damning result for The Voice. I'm particularly surprised by Tasmania's rejection, because it was a state that Yes supporters were relying on to support the referendum, and surveys before the referendum indicated it might vote yes.
Something that Mundine stated in the aftermath of the referendum results did resonate with me quite heavily:
Warren Mundine, the leading no campaigner, has credited his side’s focusing on migrant communities for helping defeat the referendum.
Mundine spoke to Sky News, noting “some of them come from countries where they were second-class citizens” and were open to a message about the voice causing a divide.
We knew that the migrant community is 50% of Australia, either born overseas or their parents have been born overseas. We deliberately target that group.”
I'm the kind of migrant that has experienced this, and am incredibly opposed to affirmative action. Progressives might think their ideas are revolutionary and new, but their mindset of victimhood, group accountability and unequal racial treatment on that basis is basically endemic in many third-world countries, and many migrants have been on the wrong side of policies that look and quack a good amount like progressive politics.
As a result, I was in support of No from the very beginning, and though I couldn't vote in it I am happy with the outcome of the referendum. If the Voice had ended up with too much influence it would essentially have been a permanent, constitutionally mandated lobbying group which constituted an outright subversion of a proper and impartial democratic process, if it ended up with too little influence it would have basically been useless. Both would have warranted a No vote.
Gamergate always seemed like a lot of the two sides talking past each other
Sure, I think we would disagree on which side is doing most of the "talking past".
The counter to "there's lot of ethics problems in videogame journalism" was never "no there aren't", it was "duh, everyone knows that; no one takes videogame journalism seriously. Why are you harassing women about it?".
This sane-washes the anti-GamerGate stance. The general anti-GamerGate stance, exemplified by Danskin, was not "well, there are ethics problems, but harassing people is a step too far", it was the stronger claim that "You people are misogynists who are just using ethics as a cover for your misogyny". Often, it does in fact veer very close to claiming that there was nothing to complain about ethically, as evidenced by Danskin's dismissal of the idea that there was an ethical conflict of interest in the Quinn/Grayson case.
As to why people got harassed, it's because it's the internet, and everybody who's even remotely controversial gets harassment. The mistake of anti-GamerGaters is to characterise basically the entirety of the harassment as being ascribable to GamerGate, when there were a large number of third parties that existed to stir shit. It, furthermore, also ignores that GamerGaters also received harassment and threats during that whole kerfuffle, and ignores their actual attempts to stop harassment. Cathy Young expounds on that argument here:
There was certainly some appalling harassment toward Quinn, Sarkeesian (who canceled a university lecture in October 2014 due to an email threatening a massacre), feminist game developer Brianna Wu (who received a death threat mentioning her home address after she mocked and trolled GamerGate), and some other people, not all of them women. Web developer and GamerGate opponent Israel Galvez was targeted by a fake 911 call that resulted in a visit from a SWAT team, a scary tactic known as “swatting.” But several caveats are in order:
(1) None of the criminal or severe harassment was ever tied to anyone known to be involved in GamerGate.
The FBI spent months investigating GamerGate-related harassment; as documents show, it ended up only issuing warnings to one man who admitted sending an email threat as a “joke” and to another who had made harassing phone calls to a woman with whom he had argued in a chat room. Neither was a known GamerGater. And, while the FBI found evidence that some of the harassment around GamerGate originated on 8chan, a site known as a GamerGate hub, some of it was linked to the forums on Something Awful, frequented by anti-GamerGate, anti-8chan posters.
When GamerGaters blamed the harassment on outside trolls, it looked like an excuse or a far-fetched conspiracy theory. But Kerzner, a neutral GamerGate observer, agrees that “there was a sizable number of third-party trolls that caused the vast majority of the really bad stuff.” There was at least one fairly well-documented instance in which the swatting of a GamerGate critic was traced — according to The Verge, hardly a GamerGate-friendly publication — to a troll from an 8chan board dedicated to “general anti-social mayhem,” where “users joked about Gamergate supporters ‘taking the fall’ for the attack.” A November 2015 post by a notorious troll known as “Wild Goose” also appears to confirm the existence of a troll nest that went after “SJWs” and “gaters” alike.
(2) While the harassment related to GamerGate was quite real, there was also a drastic failure of journalistic skepticism in reporting it.
Of course, questioning people’s reports of being victimized by harassment and threats is something that should never be done lightly. But honoring that principle shouldn’t preclude basic fact-checking.
For instance, in late 2014 and early 2015, there were scary reports of a GamerGate “psychopath” named Jace Connors who had made a series of videos threatening Wu; one of them featured knives, another a man in a skull mask. The most bizarre one showed Connors ranting dementedly against Wu after crashing his car, supposedly on his way to her house.
In February 2015, the videos were revealed to be a satirical prank; “Jace Connors” was actually sketch comedian Jan Rankowski while the man in the skull mask was one of his sidekicks, and the purpose of the videos was to troll and mock GamerGate. Yet more than two months after this disclosure, the skull mask video was still described as an instance of horrific GamerGate harassment in a Boston Magazine article.
More oddly still, Wu’s own New York Times op-ed last month asserts that GamerGaters “shot videos wearing skull masks” and displaying knives they threatened to use against her. When I reached out to Wu for comment, she initially replied that she received “many” such videos and that only GamerGaters themselves had ever claimed they were satirical — even though Wu herself was quoted commenting on the hoax in a February 2015 article in Verge. In a subsequent email, Wu reiterated that she was sent other videos matching the description during that time; however, none are mentioned on her Twitter timeline. (The closest is a screenshot of a tweet with a photo of what looks like a boy wearing a skull mask and holding a toy gun, and with a threat to kill Quinn, Sarkeesian, and Wu.) It seems likely that the reference in the op-ed is to the debunked “Jace Connors” incident.
(3) At least some of the portrayal of GamerGate as a harassment campaign had to do with speech that, while arguably unpleasant, was not threatening.
This speech ranged from polite but persistent unwanted attempts at debate (nicknamed “sea-lioning,” from a 2014 web comic) to video blogs criticizing someone’s work.
(4) GamerGaters themselves were targets of serious harassment, a fact hardly ever acknowledged in the mainstream media (with a few exceptions such as David Auerbach, then at Slate.)
A number of GamerGate supporters were doxxed (i.e., had home addresses and other private information posted online) and reported threats. In 2015, two offline GamerGate events I attended — a meetup in Washington, DC and a panel examining the pro-GamerGate side of the controversy at a Society of Professional Journalists conference in Miami — were disrupted by bomb threats that forced evacuation of the building. This received virtually no coverage.
Given that GamerGaters were defined as the “bad guys” in social justice discourse, many supposedly right-thinking people felt free to engage in startlingly hateful invective toward anyone involved. In November 2014, Geordie Tait, a Bay-area writer for the gaming website Star City Games, posted a series of tweets literally calling for a Holocaust of GamerGaters; when criticized for trivializing the Holocaust, he responded by saying that the Holocaust was “not as bad as what women have suffered.”
Even people who were not GamerGaters but were seen as too GamerGate-friendly (or even too neutral) were sometimes targeted. YouTuber John Bain, a popular video game critic known under the nickname “Total Biscuit,” who strongly condemned harassment but also took the view that GamerGaters had some valid concerns, said that he was inundated with abusive messages while undergoing chemotherapy for colon cancer, including messages wishing for his painful death. (Some GamerGate critics also vilified Bain after he succumbed to cancer last year.) Kerzner was a victim of false rumors intended to undermine her career — rumors that chat transcripts disclosed in 2016 seemed to confirm came from anti-GamerGate activists.
(5) Many GamerGaters not only denounced harassment toward their opponents but actively tried to curb it.
Early on, some members launched a “#GamerGate harassment patrol.” In October 2014, Kotaku reporter Jason Schreier, a strong GamerGate critic, acknowledged on Twitter that GamerGaters were rallying to report a troll who was doxxing journalists. In a Kotaku article a month later, Schreier credited GamerGaters with tracking down a man responsible for a string of threats to Sarkeesian (though he still suggested that the climate created by GamerGate had probably egged the perpetrator on).
The thing is, the amount of pure toddler foot-stamping tantrums that I am seeing about him running Twitter is forcing me to sort of admire Musk.
I've seen the very same thing in the circles I'm in. I can't stop hearing this self-satisfied gloating from people about how Twitter is going to be gone in six months to a year and about how they have left Twitter for good after Musk's acquisition.
And yeah, there's also the profoundly disturbing talk about how the Shepherds Of Culture need to be allowed to censor things and control the informational environment to prevent people from seeing or even thinking about certain ideas because certain types of speech are just too dangerous to be allowed. Much better to have a centralised authority determine what Truth is for the unwashed masses!
It really makes me root for Musk.
I don't know if he's running the place the right way. He may indeed be an idiot. Twitter may indeed fail (and I won't miss it for a second). But damn it, when he's posting video of "here's a cupboard full of #StayWoke t-shirts I found at Twitter HQ", I find myself laughing. And hoping he'll succeed.
That's incredible, somehow I missed this. It's pretty indicative of what the political bent was at Twitter, despite complaints of progressive bias so often being derided as baseless by the mainstream.
Your link seems to lead to a 404 error page, here's a working link to your article:
Archive link, for anyone who can't bypass the paywall:
What are the responses we offer to women? Outlawing gender based discrimination in pay? That seems... fine to me?
One has to not be paying attention in order to believe that that is the only response offered to women. Governments around the world have devoted significant amounts of resources towards rectifying the supposedly problematic gender pay gap and resolving women's underrepresentation in STEM and leadership roles.
For example, in my country (Australia):
Noting that the gender pay gap remained significant, the government announced a $1.9 billion package to improve women’s economic security. The sum takes in $1.7 billion over five years for increased childcare subsidies, as well as $25.7 million to help more women pursue careers in science, engineering and maths.
The package also includes $38.3 million to fund projects that assist women into leadership roles.
Some quotes from the relevant budget statement:
The Government’s Boosting Female Founders Initiative provides co-funded grants to majority women-owned and led start-ups, and facilitates access to expert mentoring and advice. The Initiative, announced in the 2018 and further expanded in the 2020 Women’s Economic Security Statements, provides $52.2 million in competitive grant funding plus $1.8 million in mentoring support. The program commenced in 2020, with round one of the Initiative providing approximately $11.9 million in grant funding to 51 successful applicants. Round two closed on 22 April 2021.
And:
To further grow the pool of women in STEM, the Government is investing $42.4 million over seven years to support more than 230 women to pursue Higher Level STEM Qualifications. These scholarships will be provided in partnership with industry, to build job-ready experience, networks and the cross-cutting capabilities to succeed in modern STEM careers. This program will complement the Women in STEM Cadetship and Advanced Apprenticeships Program announced in the 2020-21 Budget, which targets women to enter industry-relevant, pre-bachelor study.
And:
The Australian Government is committed to supporting more women into leadership positions and to further closing the gender pay gap. The Government is providing $38.3 million over five years to expand the successful Women’s Leadership and Development Program. This builds on the $47.9 million expansion to the Program announced as part of the 2020 Women’s Economic Security Statement. This program funds projects such as Women Building Australia run by Master Builders Australia to support more women into building and construction. These initiatives form part of the Government’s response to increasing gender equality, extending leadership and economic participation opportunities for Australian women, and building a safer, more respectful culture.
https://archive.budget.gov.au/2021-22/womens-statement/download/womens_budget_statement_2021-22.pdf
That's from the 2021-22 budget statement, what has Australia been doing in 2022-23? Let's have a look:
Further measures in the Budget are focused on helping women into higher-paying and traditionally male-dominated industries. To boost the number of women in trades, the Government is investing $38.6 million over 4 years from 2022‑23. Women who commence in higher paying trade occupations on the Australian Apprenticeship Priority List will be provided additional supports, such as mentoring and wraparound services.
And:
The Morrison Government is making a further investment, building on the success of existing initiatives to improve leadership outcomes for women, by providing an additional $18.2 million for the Women’s Leadership and Development Program.
This includes $9 million from 2023-24 to 2025-26 to expand the successful Future Female Entrepreneurs program to develop and grow women’s core entrepreneurial skills. Funding will continue the successful Academy for Enterprising Girls (10-18 year olds) and the Accelerator for Enterprising Women, expanding it to include all women aged 18+, as well as adding a new Senior Enterprising Women program.
To support women facing unique barriers to leadership and employment, the Government is also investing $9.4 million to expand the Future Women’s Jobs Academy and to support gender balanced boards.
Governments are not the only ones who have done this. Blackrock, the world's largest asset manager, is explicitly using their voting power as shareholders to force gender diversity in boards of directors.
We voted against one or more directors at over 3,400 companies globally. Corporate governance concerns - including lack of board independence, insufficient diversity, and executive compensation - prompted most of the votes against directors' elections," BIS stated."
According to BlackRock, insufficient board gender diversity was the main reason for voting against a director in the Americas region, where it voted against 1,554 directors at 975 companies - or 61% of the votes that the firm cast against directors in the region - for board gender diversity-related reasons.
When women complain, they receive commiseration, help and often outright preferencing. I can't say that I see the same thing occurring when men complain.
Is it an effective debating tactic? This is an interesting experiment (and a pretty funny one at that) but what the results seem to indicate is that ChatGPT's responses lack the dynamism of an actual human. Most of its responses are almost indistinguishable from each other - it seems to be unable to adapt to the prior context of the conversation and tailor its output accordingly, and the uncanniness is pretty identifiable as a result. The only reason why it even works at all is that all the people responding to it are as low IQ and NPC-like as your median Twitter user.
I've been waiting for the Fun Thread to post this, since it is manifestly not CW. I had a conversation about physics, namely about the expansion of space and the feasibility of intergalactic travel, in the CW thread a few days back. I came back to it, and some things I wrote have been bugging me enough that I want to issue a clarification.
Here's the relevant thread.
https://www.themotte.org/post/120/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/15941?context=8#context
Basically I said that the expansion of the universe renders galaxies that are beyond a certain distance unreachable absent some form of FTL travel, since the universe's expansion isn't set at any constant rate of speed - any two points in space recede at a rate proportional to their distance from each other, and that distance is increasing, therefore the rate of recession of the two points is increasing. This means there will be some galaxies far enough away from us that they recede faster than the speed of light.
I got this question in response: "Is it not the case that, once we start moving towards those distant objects (in say a colony ship), the expansion behind us compensates for a growing portion of that total expansion? It's my understanding that there IS an inflection point as you describe, but we haven't reached it yet."
And this was my reply: "The case for an inflection point is pretty strong. It’s my understanding that for objects that have already crossed the boundary of the event horizon, no reduction of the distance between us and that object will occur. Think about it this way: There are objects far enough away from you that they are moving away at a rate that exceeds the speed of light, meaning without FTL travel they will be receding from you faster than you can travel to them. The space between you and any object beyond that horizon will only increase and the further they go, the faster they recede. If you try to reach it in a relativistic colony ship, all that happens is that you’ll be stranded from your original galaxy group and will never reach the new one as your galaxy of origin passes out of your event horizon. Sure, you are closer to the object and further away from your point of origin than you would've counterfactually been, but that does not equate to closing the distance."
The issue here is that there are additional real-life complexities absent in the model I was outlining which I neglected to address when I wrote this (note: do not write when you're tired unless you want to omit things you should've mentioned). Now, I don't have too much of a problem with what I wrote here - I stand behind my point that ceteris paribus, anything in a superluminally receding region of space in which expansion is driving the objects away from you faster than light would simply be completely unreachable, and you wouldn't be able to magically "close the distance" and catch up. The area where things are receding from us slower than light is called our Hubble volume, and is a sphere approx 14 billion light years in radius (everything outside of it is moving away faster than light). However, I want to clear something up: We can sometimes receive light from galaxies outside our Hubble sphere at the time the light was emitted, meaning light-speed information in a region of space which is receding from us faster than light can in fact travel to us. So how can this be possible?
The reason is because the Hubble constant (the unit that describes how fast the universe is expanding at different distances from a particular point in space) is decreasing, causing our Hubble volume to expand. This means that photons emitted by galaxies in a superluminal region can eventually enter inside of our Hubble volume and be able to reach us, and this is not because light is magically "catching up" - it is receding, but its recession doesn't outpace the growth of our Hubble volume. Similarly, the recession speed between light we emit and an object farther than the Hubble distance is initially positive, but can become negative as the Hubble distance increases. Here's a Veritasium video with a visual representation of how this can happen.
Of course, there's a limit to this too - there's a point beyond which light emitted from objects are receding from us so fast that they will never fall inside of our Hubble volume, and this boundary is delineated by the "cosmological event horizon" which is currently about 16 billion light years in radius.
There is another bigger issue that I want to correct here, and that's my statement that we might not make it outside our Local Group (and that this has something to do with expansion). I knew previously that our reachable universe was much larger than that, but of course practically speaking that's very optimistic and assumes we leave now and at the speed of light. What I was thinking was that 1: if relativistic speeds are hard to accomplish, our closest galaxies might be expanding away from us faster than we can travel, and 2: even if relativistic speeds are possible expansion might set a limit on how much we can progress before our closest galaxies are eventually isolated from us. Again, I wrote this bit while not thinking too deeply about it, and have since reasoned myself out of this position.
With regards to the first point, one of our closest galaxy clusters (the M81 Group) is currently 11.4 million light years away from us, and the Hubble constant (according to some estimates) is 68 km/s/Mpc. 11.4 million light years is equivalent to 3.5 megaparsecs, and that means the M81 Group is expanding away from us at 238 km/s. That is a very small fraction of the speed of light, and probably isn't impossible for us to exceed given that the Parker Solar Probe has already been able to reach speeds of 163 km/s. The rate of recession only becomes prohibitive for objects much further from us.
Note, this doesn't mean that I think travel to another galaxy cluster is actually that feasible, it just means expansion wouldn't pose too large an obstacle for us. The reason why it would be difficult in a practical sense is not just because of the difficulty of finding a reasonable propulsion method, it's also because of the time involved to travel the entire distance. Even in a colony ship travelling at 99% of the speed of light, the trip to the M81 Group would take an unrealistically long time, even accounting for relativistic effects from the perspective of the traveller. As viewed from the spaceship, an 11.4 million light-year trip would be 1,624,412 years long, which is far longer than the entirety of human history (here's a neat website that helps you calculate these things, for the lazy). This is assuming that we travel constantly at 99% the speed of light the entire way, it's not taking into account acceleration and deceleration to the destination, so this is a minimum estimate. There's simply no way to design for missions of that length, nor will there be for a very long time, if indeed ever.
Accelerating to 99.99999999...% of the speed of light would create enough dilation to get us there in an acceptably short time, but there's something else stopping us from doing that (even assuming we manage to find a method of propulsion which will allow us to go that fast, which is a big assumption). And that's space dust. At 99% of the speed of light, hitting a 4 milligram grain of dust in space gets you 2,188,941 megajoules of kinetic energy (here's the calculator I used, I use them because I want to mess with the variables without having to do the calculation again and again). A ton of TNT contains 4,184 megajoules of energy, so that 4 milligram grain of dust at 0.99c is going to be equivalent to 523 tons of TNT exploding. Even hitting a dust grain of 0.1 mg at that speed is going to yield you 54,724 megajoules of kinetic energy, equivalent to 13 tons of TNT.
Get closer and closer to the speed of light so that the travel duration becomes more reasonable, and eventually these grains of dust are going to start looking more and more like Hiroshima.
So it's not that I think that travelling to another galaxy cluster is feasible, it's rather that at this point, expansion is a red herring. If we can't travel faster than 238 km/s in the first place, the travel time would be far too long for us to even think about starting a mission even assuming that the M81 Group isn't receding from us. Even non-lethal relativistic speeds won't take us there in any reasonable time. Travelling to other galaxy clusters is probably FTL or nothing (we're talking Alcubierre drives and wormholes here and not actual travel faster than light, because of the constraints relativity poses, and there are still many problems with those methods which means there is plenty of reason to suspect FTL is not possible).
As to the second point about the time limit expansion imposes, it turns out the timeframe we have before our closest neighbours have receded into superluminally receding regions of space which we will never be able to reach (without FTL, that is) is hundreds of billions of years, so this timeframe probably doesn't pose too much of an obstacle. Whether exiting our Local Group is actually feasible or not in the first place is almost certainly the main factor. And the reasons why it might not be feasible are huge.
problem_redditor
7d ago
To be a bit flippant, I feel that in order to consider this a stain on your character, you must have dysfunctionally low levels of Machiavellianism, way below the average and possibly to the point it constitutes a pathology.
You haven't done anything wrong.
problem_redditor
1yr ago
I'm aware of how it looks. That being said, Danskin's UC Merced talk is from 2021, so if the woke are still talking about it, I see no reason why they shouldn't continue to be countered and called out on their misstatements. Furthermore, I am aware of several occasions where users on TheMotte have stated that they'd like to know more about GamerGate from a non-mainstream source to get an alternative opinion, and I thought this video would be a good jumping-off point to get into the topic.
4/4
22 March 2014: Grayson publishes an article in RockPaperShotgun called "A Game And A Chat: The End Of GDC Spectacularmathon". In it, Zoe Quinn and Depression Quest is featured again.
Some quotes:
"Part one’s guests include Papers Please creator Lucas Pope, Depression Quest creator Zoe Quinn, and Boon Hill dev Matt Ritter. Part two, meanwhile, brings in such luminaries and champion toe fighters as Gone Home writerly brain man Steve Gaynor, Kotaku features editor Kirk Hamilton, resident Vlambeer madman JW Nijman, Action Henk‘s Kitty Calis, and RPS god heroes Cara Ellison and Hayden Dingman."
"Among many other things, we talked everyone’s favorite GDC moments, diversity in the gaming industry, the virtual reality fuuuuuuuture’s growing pains, my Lost Levels talk, and what happens after you release a game like Papers Please or Depression Quest."
So again, Quinn and Depression Quest are highlighted alongside far larger games like Papers Please. Just like all the others, this isn't incriminating on its own, but it does form part of a larger pattern. No conflict of interest is reported.
23 March 2014: Quinn openly admits she hangs with Grayson on Twitter.
Quinn: @tha_rami I'm headed over to butter to hang with @Vahn16
25 March 2014: Quinn and Grayson speak again on Twitter and send "solidarity" to each other. Quinn is calling Grayson "friend" and they are confirmed to be emailing each other.
Quinn: Realizing the degrees to which working on my art and career has destroyed like 95% of my personal life.
Grayson: @ZoeQuinnzel I am sending solidarity from my lonely bedroom work perch. I will be here until 5AM or so, I'm thinking
Quinn: @Vahn16 solidarity from the skies, friend. Also answer your damn email
https://archive.md/mmArt#selection-1387.0-1393.63
30 March 2014: Zoe Quinn speaks with Leigh Alexander on Twitter about going to Vegas with Nathan Grayson for a planned collaboration, the DAY BEFORE Grayson wrote an article about her.
Quinn: @leighalexander good thing I'm launching a gonzo games zine this week I guess
Alexander: @ZoeQuinnzel omg no way i wanna know about this
Quinn: @leighalexander it involves me and @notquitefrodo and @Carachan1 and @Vahn16 all going to vegas.
31 March 2014: Grayson writes an article in Kotaku featuring Quinn, and it's his most incriminating yet. The article is called "The Indie Game Reality TV Show That Went To Hell". This happens only three days before they go to Vegas (where they have sex). The topic of the article is about the failed GAME_JAM which Zoe Quinn was involved in. He paints Quinn as the "good guy" in the drama that ensued and at the very end, he posts about Quinn's desire to start her own game jam.
"And while the experience was trying for all involved, it was also rife with important lessons. Quinn summed it up:"
""There was this amazing thing that happened after the production was over. Without any organization or prompting, we acquired and shared some refreshments around, set up some multiplayer games, invited production staff to just come be people and play with us, and had a spontaneous pop up party more or less. It was the first time I had started to feel like myself at all since landing in LA. I started to remember what life felt like off-set again, and it reminded me of what I love about game jams and the indie community in general. It felt like such a complete contrast to the 24 hours that preceded it, and a thought clicked into my head.""
""I want to run a game jam. I'd love to have the LPers do what they're so often so brilliant at and bridge the gap between the games and the audience, and do it super low-tech, low-budget, documentary style. Capture the inspiration, the hard work, the 3am delirium and the dumb jokes that come with it. Show people how we all band together and support each other through the deadline. That's what I want to show the world about game jams. That's the ambassador I'd rather be.""
This is incriminating because at least less than a month later, in April 2014, Quinn went on to solicit donations for her own game jam, called Rebel Jam, despite having no start date and no determined location. Clicking on the "donate" button goes to what looks like a personal Paypal account. Even more importantly, Rebel Jam never actually ended up happening. I'm going to be charitable and assume that Quinn couldn't get enough funding, but there's also the more unpleasant possibility that I don't think I have to mention.
Either way, it doesn't matter because this looks pretty bad regardless of the point of Rebel Jam. Grayson and Quinn's exchanges definitively seem to imply that they are close, and him creating publicity for her projects definitely violates any code of journalistic integrity.
Again, no conflict of interest is disclosed.
2 April 2014: Quinn states that the Vegas trip is the next day.
Molinari: @legobutts @ZoeQuinnzel Did I hear someone's coming to Vegas? :o
Quinn: @OneMrBean @legobutts Yeah! I'm going there tomorrow for a few days with @Vahn16 and @notquitefrodo
2/3 April 2014: Grayson and Quinn go to Vegas and even tweet at each other during the car ride.
Grayson: I've lost track of the number of hours we've been on the road (1? 2?!?). I've eaten both my bags of mini-Reese's. Morale dwindling
Quinn: @Vahn16 what the hell you already ate all that?
Grayson: @ZoeQuinnzel MY FOOT IS ON YOUR CHAIR WE WILL USE HUMAN SPEECH DAMMIT
Quinn: @Vahn16 I don't sound like a human right now tho also you just tweeted me telling me we were gonna talk instead of tweeting you boob
https://twitter.com/UnburntWitch/status/451535398980706304
3 April 2014: Grayson posts a vine while in Vegas which features Quinn.
Grayson: The most Las Vegas thing I've ever seen in Las Vegas
Here is the vine in question. You can see what looks like Quinn's hair in the bottom right when you play the video. It's easily distinguishable because of just how oddly coloured it is.
At some point during the Vegas trip, they start having sex. This is corroborated by Gjoni's logs in The Zoe Post, and it is backed up by Grayson's admission in the Totilo article where he states that they started a romantic relationship in early April.
5 April 2014: The end of the Vegas trip. Grayson and Quinn act all mushy on Twitter talking about how they'll "miss each other's faces", and a mutual doesn't seem very surprised to see this lovey dovey behaviour.
Quinn: @Vahn16 yep definitely miss yer face already
Grayson: @ZoeQuinnzel aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaame
Quinn: @Vahn16 <3 <3 <3
Harper: @ZoeQuinnzel @Vahn16 Guys, gross. At least invite me next time so I get to be all lovey too. sourface, bitterface
Quinn: @NikaHarper @Vahn16 fuck yes you are invited as HECK
https://archive.is/t56H4#selection-4233.1-4233.73
So let's recap what we have here. Grayson and Quinn seem to have been good friends whose relationship strengthened overtime (just going off their Twitter exchanges alone), and throughout the time they knew each other Grayson wrote not one, not two, not three, but four articles featuring Zoe Quinn all of which brought attention to her future or current projects in some way. The fourth of these articles is the most blatant, undeniable and egregious, and in it Grayson unashamedly shills for Quinn's upcoming game jam project that she solicits donations for (and which never actually ends up happening). And that article is set only a few days before they have sex in Vegas.
As a journalist, if you have a conflict of interest you have to recuse yourself or disclose the conflict of interest, and Grayson did neither. Grayson's excuse was that since they supposedly didn't have sex until a few days after the GAME_JAM article was published, they weren't in a "relationship" at the time, so it's apparently fine that they were at the very least friends before then and were doing a lot of stuff that indicated their blatant personal conflict of interest. But as this redditor notes: "personal conflicts of interest are not limited to people you are having sex with, and putting the sex a few days after the article doesn't really make it notably more ethical".
Funnily enough, Totilo himself stated back in August 2014 on Twitter that "reporters who are in any way close to people they might report on should recuse themselves". Wonder where that principle went.
https://twitter.com/stephentotilo/status/501817475097702402
Anyway, I hope you've noticed just how different the reality is from the portrayal in Danskin's talk to UC Merced, where he makes sure to completely brush over anything at all that might imply that there was a breach of journalistic ethics. The treatment of Gamergate by the mainstream has been an attempt at historical revisionism par excellence, where any indication of unethical behaviour has been stripped out of the record and replaced with some narrative where no one ever had any justification to be angry and Quinn was only ever a Poor Oppressed Victim being unjustly attacked by a virulently misogynist mob. It is an example of where if you repeat a falsehood enough, people will accept it as truth.
People have already addressed the trans issue, so I'll tackle the Roe v. Wade one. With regards to abortion rights, the right views the "status quo ante" of Roe v. Wade as being premised on illegitimate grounds and essentially sees it as a form of imperialism where liberals are imposing policies they want on largely conservative states that would otherwise not adopt them. I think this view has merit, given that Roe v. Wade was quite honestly a bad ruling with the flimsiest of rationalisations offered up to justify overriding state autonomy on the issue, and so the right likely views what they've done to overturn it as defensive action on their part (returning things to how they should be). They probably identify the moment Roe v. Wade was decided as the attack, and I don't think they're wrong.
I'm not actually very strongly opinionated about abortion myself and I think it is a complex issue with a lot of moral greyness involved. But it seems to me that the pro-democracy move here is to allow states more decision-making power on the topic of abortion, and it's fairly easy to see that the left's position on this is "It's perfectly okay for the Supreme Court to explicitly misconstrue the U.S. Constitution and pretend it protects an activity that it clearly does not - if we think it is for a good cause".
This is somewhat unrelated to the topic of what's responsible for the drop in Twitter's revenue, but the article's bent is so typical.
A surge in racist slurs, a coordinated campaign to spread antisemitic memes, an owner posting a baseless conspiracy theory: welcome to the first few days of Elon Musk's Twitter.
Right from the get-go, their argument is "Musk's Twitter is bad because people on it might feel empowered to say unapproved things", and as the article continues there's a strong implication throughout that speech should be curtailed.
The rationalisation for limiting speech never amounts to anything more than a claim that we should make sure people can't hear certain points of view for the good of society. Instead of having people duke it out in a public forum wherein ideas can openly and freely be challenged and contested, the idea is that we shouldn't allow sentiments that are "wrong" and "harmful" (at least according to the person taking umbrage) to be promulgated in any way, shape or form, even in an environment where people can challenge it if they disagree. Some people might hear them and be convinced of their arguments, and that means they should be pre-emptively stripped of access to ideas that we don't like.
All I'll say is that I, for one, certainly see no way in which allowing a small group of people to have a disproportionate amount of sway over the informational environment would ever go bad and result in the widespread persistence of false but unexamined ideas that end up having a negative impact on society.
EDIT: clarity
the effect of online dating is already disastrous and we've only began to feel it, and that you all are intent on dodging, downplaying and misrepresenting the core issue.
I've been wanting to write an effortpost about how TheMotte (or at least, a significant subset of it) falls into many of the same traps that the mainstream does when talking about sex relations, but haven't really gotten around to it and also realise that post is inevitably going to draw an utterly exhausting flood of dismissive rhetoric and criticism.
Even in heterodox communities like this one there's still quite a bit of dodging and downplaying when it comes to many topics surrounding sex relations, specifically those topics that relate to men's issues and especially those with an element to them that doesn't make women look fantastic. It's a thing that's very emotionally charged and controversial even for a community whose purpose is to discuss topics outside of the Overton window, and bringing up these topics seems to elicit from people quite a bit of pearl-clutching and emotional appeal and fervent attempts to justify their knee-jerk reactions to things they'd rather not confront. Hell, I've seen more pushback here on this than HBD. (Meanwhile in the broader public sphere female claims of victimisation are constantly treated as a pressing social issue even when the core claim is incredibly questionable.)
Really, the discomfort ultimately just seems to come down to something deeper and much more instinctual: "Men who complain about their situation as men (and especially those who do so at the expense of those who possess a greater social claim to protection, like women) are inherently low status". In the case of the dating market, that disgust is further amplified by the stigma that already attaches to sexually unsuccessful males. And my posting and engagement with people on the topic has slowed partially because it's really started to hit home that the asymmetry in discourse surrounding sex relations might be unfixable.
EDIT: clarity
Women have options men do not have for terminating pregnancy because men do not get pregnant.
In my opinion, abortion is a far more morally fraught method of surrendering parental responsibility than legal paternal surrender (LPS). There's the worse issue in abortion of "maybe we're killing something here that deserves rights" which simply isn't present in LPS. Perhaps hardline pro-choicers who don't see the unborn as being deserving of rights at any stage of development and don't see any moral greyness in any part of the issue would disagree, but IMO that's a thorny issue which is very unique to abortion. It actually appears to me that abortion is a more questionable practice than LPS. There are very few methods of surrendering parental responsibility that don't invite moral objection.
And that debate aside, the existence of abortion as a unique option for women that already exists by virtue of them getting pregnant raises the question as to why women have further additional methods of surrendering their parental responsibility that men do not after birth.
Only a handful of infants are surrendered every year under safe haven laws. I doubt many of those were produced by fathers who otherwise would have been willing participants in the child's upbringing.
By bringing up safe haven abandonment I'm not arguing that women are giving babies away that fathers want (though that is a distinct possibility and IIRC in the case of adoption there have been cases where biological fathers were alienated from their children - the rights of fathers are often not appropriately respected in these proceedings). Rather, I'm arguing that if a woman does not want a kid she's given birth to, she can abandon it, and put the burden on the state to deal with it.
If we were to be consistent with the principle that taxpayers should not be obligated to pay for children that aren't theirs, she should not be allowed to access safe haven abandonment at all. She should be made to keep the kid that she chose to carry to term, and help the state identify the biological father so the child can receive support from both parents. That this is not the current system is pretty incongruent.
But they don't actually care about this, they just want to be able to have consequence-free sex and leave the woman stuck with the responsibility of deciding what to do if she becomes pregnant. I believe exactly zero arguments based on "unfairness."
I'm a pretty strong supporter of LPS myself from a moral consistency standpoint. I'm also very certain your characterisation doesn't accurately portray my motivations for arguing in favour of it, given the fact that I don't have any desire to have "consequence-free sex" with women. Or just sex with women at all.
Very few of the policies I argue in favour of with regards to male-female relations actually end up benefiting me.
The point you carefully elide is that in those cases where a woman can sever her responsibilities, she's also terminating any responsibility the father has as well.
Correct. She is allowed to sever her responsibilities if she wants, and also terminate the father's responsibilities in the process. None of this contradicts my assertion that women have an array of options they can utilise to terminate their parental responsibilities, some of which they can utilise even after birth, and men typically cannot do so at any stage of the process without also having the woman's cooperation and consent.
You should be telling the OP that, not the users providing arguments as to why the OP's starting line is flawed. The OP was claiming "The left is defending against conservative attempts to attack Roe v. Wade" when in fact the right-wing attempt to overturn Roe v. Wade can be seen as a defence against a very questionable attempt by the left to impose their preferred policy decisions on states which would not otherwise have adopted them.
The left doesn't get to claim "I'm defending against an attack" when the act that they are purportedly defending against is, in and of itself, an attempt at defence against something that was initially done by the left. You might be able to push the starting line back further and place conservatives as the first stone-thrower if you could prove that 1: before Roe v. Wade conservatives were imposing their preferences regarding abortion on liberal states or something along those lines, and 2: Roe v. Wade was a leftist attempt to defend against this somehow, but you'd actually have to convincingly make your case instead of simply claiming that Tanista's argument is an arbitrary one.
This is basically a rehash of the "It's [current year], why is [thing I don't like] still happening" meme, without using these exact words.
Apart from the specific criticisms of the incident others have already offered, I'd note that this "society is still racist" idea bubbling right under the surface of your comment basically implies that for society to be sufficiently non-racist the incidence of bad actors would need to be literally zero, which is ridiculous and impossible.
I'll also note that it's very easy for media to create the appearance of omnipresent racism. They can do this because if the population is large enough even incidents with a 1 in 1000 chance of occurring will occur sufficiently regularly, which means the frequency of news reporting on racist incidents is high enough to give everyone the illusion that racism is everywhere regardless of actual probability.
(Except anti-white racism, that can be swept under the rug or alternatively, if it is legalised, portrayed as noble diversity initiatives aimed at helping PoC.)
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